Dr Peter Hill

Associate Professor

School: Humanities and Social Sciences

Peter is a historian of the modern Middle East, specialising in the Arab world in the long nineteenth century. His research focusses on political thought and practice, the politics of religion, and translation and intercultural exchanges. He also has a strong interest in comparative and global history.

Before joining Northumbria University in 2019, Peter was Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, University of Oxford. He has taught and designed modules in the history of the Middle East and global history, and the history of capitalism. In 2023 he was the winner of a Philip Leverhulme Prize in History.

Peter's first book, Utopia and Civilisation in the Arab Nahda, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. He has published several articles on translation, political thought and popular politics in the Middle East, in journals such as Past & Present, the Journal of Arabic Literature, and Journal of Global History. His second book, Prophet of Reason: Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East, will be published by Oneworld in spring 2024.

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Research Themes and Scholarly Interests

Peter's main research interests are in the cultural and intellectual history of the Middle East in the long nineteenth century. He is also interested in global history and histories of capitalism, and in the place of the Middle East within wider historical processes.

Peter's monograph, published in 2020, is a study of the Arab literary and cultural 'revival' (Nahda), looking at the earlier phase of the movement in the 1830s-1870s. The book places the utopian imaginings of Arab intellectuals, in Beirut, Cairo, and Aleppo, within the contexts of expanding capitalism and the building of modern states. Peter has also published articles on literary aspects of the Nahda movement in journals such as PMLA and the Journal of Arabic Literature.

A related strand of his research is on the history of political ideas and forms in the Arab-Ottoman world, and their relationships with European and global trends in the 'age of revolutions' and mid-nineteenth century 'age of capital'. He has published articles on these themes in Past and Present and the Journal of Global History. He currently runs a collaborative research network on 'Reframing the Age of Revolutions'.

Peter has an interest in collaborative research into global history and histories of capitalism, which he has pursued through the Political Economy and Culture in Global History project. He co-edited a virtual issue of Past and Present on 'Capitalism in Global History', which emerged from these discussions.

Peter's major project at present explores the changing notations of reason and religion in the nineteenth-century Arab-Ottoman world, via a microhistorical study of a Syrian notable and polymath and his changing religious views. This builds, in part, on his earlier work on the first translations into Arabic of European Enlightenment literature. He is a member of the British Society for Middle East Studies (BRISMES) and the Raymond Williams Society.

Key Publications

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Literary optics: staging the collective in the Nahda; The Arab Nahda as popular entertainment: mass culture and modernity in the Middle East: by Maha Abdelmegeed, Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 2024, 270 pp., $95 (hardback), $34.95 (paperback, ebook), ISBN 9780815638278, 9780815638285, 9780815657019; edited by Hala Auji, Raphael Cormack, and Alaaeldin Mahmoud, London, I.B. Tauris, 2024. 246 pp., £85 (hardback), £28.99 (paperback), £26.09 (ebook), ISBN 9780755647408, 9780755647446, 9780755647415, 9780755647422, Hill, P. 2 Jan 2026, In: Middle Eastern Literatures
Michalis Sotiropoulos, Liberalism after the Revolution: The Intellectual Foundations of the Greek State, c. 1830–1880. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 300 pp., £25.99 (pb), ISBN 9781009254687., Hill, P. 2 Jun 2026, In: Intellectual History Review
Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi and Arabic Constitutionalism, Hill, P. 28 Jul 2025, Constitutionalism Unbound, Leiden, Netherlands, Brill
A Mountain Childhood, Hill, P. 2 May 2024, Prophet of Reason, London, Oneworld Academic
Prophet of Reason: Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East, Hill, P. 2 May 2024
The paradoxes of Mikha'il Mishaqa, Hill, P. 31 Jul 2024
Utopia and utopian writing in Arabic, Hill, P. 30 Nov 2023, The Oxford Handbook of Thomas More’s Utopia, Oxford, Oxford University Press
Mount Lebanon and Greece: Mediterranean Crosscurrents, 1821-1841, Hill, P. 7 Jan 2022, In: Historein
Asad Rustum and the Egyptian Occupation of Syria (1831-1841): Between Narratives of Modernity and Documentary Exactitude, Hill, P. 9 Dec 2021, In: Philological Encounters

PGR Supervision

Andrew Peak 'The word ‘Bolshevik’ does not need to be translated anywhere in the world': International communist debates in the Turkish context, 1918-1932 Start Date: 01/10/2023
Andrew Peak 'The word ‘Bolshevik’ does not need to be translated anywhere in the world': International communist debates in the Turkish context, 1918-1932 Start Date: 01/10/2023 End Date: 17/10/2025

Qualifications